The producers of this year’s 72nd Emmy Awards promised some unexpected moments, and it didn’t take long for that to come true. That is, if you classify “almost burning down the St…
sprayed the envelope with Lysol, and then set it on fire to jokingly sterilize it. Aniston was there with a fire extinguisher — but unlike in rehearsals, the stubborn fire wouldn’t go out. By the third time the flames reappeared, neither Aniston nor Kimmel noticed — until the stage manager alerted them., who was backstage at the Staples Center on Sunday, and spoke to Variety after the telecast to share the behind the scenes tales of how the night went.
“I may have grabbed some arms to hold them back,” she said. “Which is kind of crazy, ‘let my husband burn!’ But I didn’t want people rushing out. I knew that they would figure it out. I knew they would get that fire out. And of course they did. And I didn’t want to ruin it. America doesn’t want to see us, they want to see those two.”
“It’s a huge challenge to do a show like this without an audience,” McNearney said. “Any host feeds off of the energy and the laughter from the crowd. And we were going in with a deficit of not having that. I gotta tell you, just going into Staples Center was kind of depressing, even though it was necessary for the safety of everybody. But we still wanted to have that feeling of a live show and with audience reaction. We didn’t want to do 10 minutes of Jimmy standing there with crickets.
“I don’t know how the hell they pulled that off,” McNearney said. “It was important to us that people got to hold the statue. They have this big night. And we didn’t want to just say we’re going to drop in the mail for you months from now. So we had all these, delivered by people in Hazmat suits, standing by, and they were outside all of those nominees’ homes or hotel rooms.
“Losing Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Friday before was weighing on all of us,” McNearney said. We thought, how do we deal with this, she’s not a television star. She’s an American icon, but we wanted to acknowledge her in some way and pay our respects but then also, keep her separate from us petty television people. So that was really kind of the only unexpected moment.
“Everyone was very distant, everyone had to be tested,” McNearney said. “We had two tips up our noses every day and tonight everyone that was there had to be tested negative. And then we all not only had masks on, we had face shields on. None of us could breathe and it was a delight. I have to tell you, it is so incredibly challenging communicating with people with two masks on your face. And it’s live, and you’re trying to yell things at each other.
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